There can be many customers on Twitter interested in your products or services, but it’s not that easy to find them. Using the Twitter’s search panel to search for hash tags, organizations or users is quite common; the important thing, here, is you get great results and don’t end up with general results.

See the snapshot below for using the search bar in Twitter to look for a particular company.

Advanced search operators enable you to narrow down your search and reach to people who are either looking for your product, conversing about a competitor or simply trying to get your attention. These operators can be entered manually with the keywords in the search bar.

Here are four ways to perform advanced search to find leads on Twitter.

1. Using Username Queries to find brand mentions
Username search queries offer a convenient way to track new leads. Two operators “to:” and “from:” are used.

The “to:” operator displays all the tweets sent to the user while the “from:” operator displays tweets sent from the user. For example, a search query “to:fullestop” will display all the tweets sent to the user @fullestop. See the snapshot below:

The search results provide you a list of potential customers and give you a useful insight into the minds of your target audience. Taking part in the conversation and offering answers or advice is a good way to build relationships. This enhances trust and encourages them to use your products or services.

In the same way, you can use operators to know about your competitors and their standing on twitter. You can even contact unhappy customers with better deals and discount offers.

2. Using Geo-location search to find leads in target zone

If you want to find tweets in a particular area that are relevant to your business, the geo-location operator is quite useful. It lets you find tweets from a specific area, city or country.

It is especially beneficial for small or local businesses that needs to target audience in their area only and don’t require to look out for tweets from around the world.

The search is facilitated by two operators viz. “near:” and “within:” that pinpoint results from anywhere in the world. “Near:” is used to specify the area and “within:” the radius.

Again, geo-location filters can help you keep track of the competition and grieving customers, especially issues that require immediate attention.

3. Using Exclusion and Filter operators

Exclusion and filter operators enable you to discard or cut out the irrelevant information from the search results. A minus symbol, “-“, is used before a keyword, user or filter for this purpose.

For instance, if you want to track people who looking for a new SEO professional but you want to exclude tweets from or mentioning a specific competitor, your advanced search would be “SEO professional” -@CompetitorName.

The filter operator is useful in getting tweets that contain links. It can be used with the exclusion tool also to cut out tweets containing links.

For example, if you’re a social media marketing professional in Washington, specialized in Pinterest and you want to look for new customers, the query would be:

“Pinterest” near: 20022 within:20km -filter:links

This query will result in tweets that mention Pinterest within 20 km of your area code, but results will exclude all the tweets with links.

4. Using Sentiment search

Sentiment search operators are a way to know what your customers think about your segment, product or service. This actually provides you an opportunity to serve your owned customers with best services and generate new leads as well.

The sentiment operators include use of emoticons and symbols like question mark.

For example, a query “Shopping Mall :)” will result in tweets from people who are not happy at a shopping mall.

Using sentiment operators, we can keep track of happy and unhappy customers and take actions accordingly. Although, the results may vary when you use these operators as the search results depend on the content of the tweet. Even then, it’s still a better way to find users who need advice or are looking for information.

Offering help or answers to such users can turn them into your customer as this readily improves your online reputation and trust in your services. Thus, sentiment operators provide a way to find new customers as well.

Wrap Up

With over millions of tweets posted every day, it’s quite difficult to find the relevant tweets and users that may turn out to be your lead. Advanced search provides an effective way to achieve this. The operators can turn your simple search into a power pack that cut out the irrelevant results and return highly useful tweets.